An Appraisal of Stanley Kubrik & Arthur C. Clarke Written by Felix Voirol in 1983

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2001 apparently shows that it is possible to produce genuine suspense without having to resort to the banal recipe of excessive bloodshed. In later works, such as "The Shining", Kubrik himself was unable to refrain from it.

The spontaneous reaction at the exit of the small town cinema by the mainly young audience came as a shock to me, e.g: "What bullshit!" Can today's young movie viewer accept action films only if they contain concentrated charges of brutality? Films of the "Star Wars" type have been highly acclaimed worldwide. Mass destruction, death and violence prevail. Not even their technology can compare to the prescient quality of "2001". Their stories contain a rather weak statement.

You certainly need not be a filmmaker to realise that Kubrik's pioneering effort has brought the industry to a new level of quality. This footage can manage without any shootout scenes. It needs no "exciting" car chases and - how unconventional - no love story.
The young man in the row behind me during the 1983 showing: "If they don't bring on a woman soon, I'll fall asleep". Five minutes later, he gets up and leaves the theatre.

It looks like the finer points and gags in "2001" are lost on the majority of viewers whose senses have been blunted by sledgehammer effects á la James Bond. Just as the effects of rock music are more palpable and louder than the subtle dynamics of true jazz or classical music. Notice how sensitively Kubrik chose the music for "2001". Richard Strauss' grandiose "Also sprach Zaratustra" paints the scenes of mankind's dawn. Following the invention of tools (and weapons) is modern cinema's most striking change-of-scenes: the bone spinning through the air fading into a spacecraft, four million years later. A particularly refined choice is the background music to the space scenes - of all things - a Strauss waltz. Only one other musical score can measure up to this outstanding synergism of moving picture and sound: Richard Rodney Bennett's waltz at the train departure in Agatha Christie "Murder on the Orient Express".

The elegant musical score underlines the ease with which the two man cockpit crew in white blazers goes about everyday space travel as a matter of routine. 21st century technology is supervised in cool superiority while Kubrik gives us - not tortuous synthesised music - but "The Blue Danube". What courage! The finer puns, such as the colours of PanAm on a spaceship fuselage, a hotel named Hilton, a restaurant called Holiday Inn, or the designation "HAL 9000" claimed to be derived from IBM (next letters in the alphabet), all of them in the year 2001, will perhaps not be grasped by some of today's younger viewers. Contrary to most present-day science fiction productions, the scientific/technological consulting for "2001" was very accurate. For example there is no sound of jet (!) engines in space as we have come to accept in most sf-series. Only the respiration of actors can be heard, showing their physical and psychological stress besides the hiss of entering breathing air. This film correctly renders even the sound of an explosion in a vacuum: none. To a pilot, the cockpits of the future appear absolutely credible. Along with known abbreviations of contemporary aviation technology such as NAV (navigation) or COM (communications), other "glass cockpit screens", as they are known today, display controls of future analogues like HIB (hibernation) or NUC (nuclear). The special effects at the end of the Jupiter voyage and the colour filters used to show planetary surfaces are so good, they have remained unsurpassed in ten years. However, the technique has been copied countless times, even in tv commercials.

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In Scientific American of May 1993 an article entitled "Daisy, Daisy. Do Computers have Near-Death Experience." has something to add to this aspect: The HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey burst into a rendition of "A bicycle built for two", a song it had been taught early in its programming. The memorable scene may not be too far off the mark. That's what one researcher found out when he began to "kill" a type of computer program known as an artificial neural network. As the network approached death, it began to output not gibberish but information it had previously learned - its silicon "life" flashed before its eyes, so to speak."

Here's another example of the uncanny accuracy with which the 2001-film makers predicted the future of aerospace technology: The electronic display instruments, the pulse ("Radar") technology, the self-diagnosing circuitry and satellite nav/com, all have filtered down from the military to everyday civil aviation within two decades after being "conceived" by the Clarke-Kubrik-Unsworth team .

The question has been raised as to the message Clarke and Kubrik want to convey with this film. My attempt to seek an answer concludes that its theme is the relationship of humans with the unfathomable. 2001 is the most beautiful statement about religion since Lessing's Ring Parable.

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Nothing has changed my evaluation of the film since I wrote this article 12 years ago. It is still my number one movie epos.

See and hear also: Sound Track on CD with Karl B&oumlhm, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

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